Why we need to go to space

Spoiler alert: Mankind needs to colonise other planets. I hear you say: “Why”? This is what I’m going to explore in this series of mini-posts.

When I had my first PC in the 90ies I was into making music for a while. I had a software where I could arrange samples, little pieces of audio, into tracks. Over a short time I gathered hundreds of samples from tracks I came across and liked. Out of these I composed over a dozen songs – it was supposed to be my first album. Then the disaster happened: my hard drive failed.

Back in the days hard drives were very expensive. Most likely you would have only one in your computer. Everything is stored on that one drive. Same for backup-solutions: they were very expensive. You might have had a ZIP drive or even more primitive forms of storing large amount of data. But this was only used for companies who could afford this. Even today having a backup data outside a company is rare. The problem slowly disappears today with everything moving to the cloud. But remember, we talk about the 90ies.

Let’s rewind again back to 1996: I did not have a backup. Hours and hours of my labour of love was just gone! Friends tried to help me: they hooked up my disk to their computer to see what’s still readable. They even ran some tools trying to recover bits that got lost. But there wasn’t a lot that could be done. I lost most my files and almost all my samples. All that was left was maybe a hundred samples and a handful of songs.

Lesson learned? Duplicate what’s valuable and store it somewhere else. That’s how it works everywhere nowadays, not only in IT: everything of importance is duplicated or has a failover.

Backup for humanity

We need a backup plan for humanity. We need a failover if something goes wrong with our current population. What could go wrong? How to create a backup of mankind? These are questions I’m going to explore in the following posts.